Red Dwarf: The Last Human
by The Third Saiyan From Earth
Summary: I LOVE Red Dwarf; both the TV Series & Novels, however in regards to the Novels; I always felt it was a loss that there wasn't a definite sequel to the first two; 'Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers' & 'Better Than Life'. So, this is my interpretation of what I thought that final sequel should be; with the originally planned title. So read, enjoy & review!


Prologue

Just over 3 million years ago, a dilapidated, burnt-out mining ship that looked like an enormous splodge of red had started on a journey. A journey that would take it and its crew from their humble lives in Earth's solar system, to the other end of the galaxy itself.

It's crew however would not see all the wonders and marvels that it passed, as they were killed in a terrible radiation leak; save one man. The ships genius and sentient computer Holly had started piloting the ship out of the solar system as soon as the seals on the cadmium 2 broke. The risk of a potential enormous explosion was too great, so he had to make sure there was as little danger to the rest of humanity as possible. And so the crew had died, the ship was filled with radiation that would take years until it was safe to move around in. Millions of years before the only surviving crew member could be released from the prison that had ended up saving his life.

Dave Lister, a 3rd level technician and low-low –level maintenance worker, was the lowest raking person aboard the mining ship _Red Dwarf._ As it ended up; he was also the only remaining crew member aboard the ship. He'd been sentenced to sit out the rest of the ship's 4 and a half year jag around the solar system, forfeit all those wages and then be kicked off the ship once they were back at Earth. And his unique punishment was incarceration in one of the ship's Stasis booths. A remnant of space travel, the stasis booths could stop all time flowing within the chamber, removing the person from time and existence itself, so that when they stepped out, no matter how much time had passed; they would never have aged a second.

Lister's crime that had caused this harsh punishment had been getting caught with a cat, breaking the ships rules about quarantine and pets i.e. no pets allowed. In retrospect, it probably had been a bad idea to send the photos of himself with the cat to the ships development lab. However, what no one, except Lister himself knew that he'd done it all on purpose. He'd met the love of his life; Kristine Kochanski. They'd had 4 weeks of blissful happiness which had ended when she went back to her previous boyfriend Tim (or Tom, or Terry or whatever the Smeg his name was), saying that Lister had been a rebound and that she was very sorry. That was it for Lister, who already unhappy with the long journey time of the ships voyage, was now very sad and lonely. So he'd decided to get out of it all, and rather than just abandon ship, he was gonna spend it in a stasis booth. It was perhaps the smartest, and at the same time, the stupidest decision that Dave Lister had ever made. He was safe from the poisonous atmosphere that filled most of the ship, safe from the death of everyone he'd known. And despite what Lister would think, he wasn't alone.

Lister's pet cat; a lovely and healthy creature called Frankenstein, had been hidden away by him before he was arrested. He knew that if they found her, they'd cut her up into more pieces than shark sushi. So he'd placed her in a very secluded area of the ships hold. A place where she, and as it turned out her 5 kittens, were equally safe from the radiation that filled most of the ship above them.

Then something unexpected happened; once the cat's had grown they started to breed. And this carried on and on and on, until by the time Frankenstein died, she left behind enough family to make ever crazy cat-person in the entire universe content. But more remarkable than that, was that when food began to run out, the cats began to develop thumbs and fingers, and stand on their hind legs. It was these mutations who figured out that by using the shiny tool with the knob on it, and placing it on the metal rocks, they could open it and get food. And so Felis-Erectus was born.

The cat's continued to breed, and evolve. They went from walking around holding clubs and wearing primitive skins, to then designing trendy fashionable clothes that allowed for only the most up-to-date fashions. And so in this race's history, it was not the wheel, nor fire that was considered the greatest invention; it was the electric hair-dryer with 7 settings. With all this, and even their own religion; Felis-Sapians were there to stay.

Then the was a war, a holy war, a war that compared to all the other wars in history, made much more sense. One group of cat's believed that their god had saved the holy mother Frankenstein from the evil ones who wanted to kill her, but in saving her he was frozen in time as punishment. Their god, a man called cloister was the savior of their race, and believed that one day he would return to bring them to Fuchal; the promised land. The other group of cats believed exactly the same things, except that they believed that the holy man was named Clister. So they fought, and died. And in the end, they decided to leave _Red Dwarf_ , building two enormous arks to take them out into space in search of their god. One group went one way, the other group went another.

And all of them left behind the ones who couldn't make it; the old, the sick, the lame and the dying. And die they did, until there was just 2 left; one a cripple, one an idiot. And from these two, a son was born.

So, Lister the last human being alive who had less sense of personal hygiene than a wild pig, a creature who had evolved from cats and honestly had about half the brains were all that lived on-board _Red Dwarf._ Them, and the ships hologram.

Holograms were people, okay, they were generated by computer banks. Okay, they were basically made up of all the memories and personalities of the person they had used to been, with the big difference being they couldn't touch anything. Okay, they wandered around the place with a huge, thick silver 'H' in-bedded into their foreheads so that ordinary people didn't mistake them for themselves. But they could still be useful. Creating holograms of people, had been born out of the need to ensure that if someone died and they were vital to ship, the ships computer could bring them back so that they could continue to be useful. This tended to upset many people, as not long after being brought back, they'd rather they'd stayed dead.

Once it was safe, Holly was able to let Lister out of stasis. After he'd been released though, Lister hadn't taken the news that he was 3 million years away from earth, everyone he'd known was dead, and that in honesty, his whole race was probably extinct. He'd gone to pieces, and Holly (who over the course of the ship's long journey had gone a bit, well a bit quirky, and also completely senile) decided to resurrect a member of the crew to keep Lister from going mad. So he chose the one crew member who had spoken to Lister, and whom Lister had spoken to the most; Arnold Judas Rimmer.

Arnold Rimmer was an unfortunate man; he had a nose that looked like a bird's beak, beady eyes, and all the charm and personality of what comes out of animals, and even that was being nice. He was emotional and mental unstable and despite his life-long dreams of becoming an officer in the Space Corps, all he'd managed in his near 15 year career, was going from a 3rd technician to a 1st technician. And that knowledge, coupled with his own psyche and neurosis; twisted and ate and poisoned him inside. His resentment against life, against everyone who he felt had gotten the lucky breaks he never got knew no bounds. And then he'd met Lister, someone who could not have been more different. Lister was pathologically lazy, unclean and unkempt. Rimmer was so anal-retentive and tightened that if he farted he'd squeak. They'd been made bunk-mates, and it was from there that their relationship went immediately downhill.

And then there was the accident, which in Rimmer's memory was him walking down a corridor and getting hit in the face with an atomic explosion. Once he was brought back as a Hologram, his only thought was that this was going to ruin his career.

So the last Human-being alive, a creature who evolved from cats and a computer generated ghost were all that made up the crew of a ship that was 5 miles long and 3 miles wide. Lister had decided that they should all go back to Earth, if only to see if anyone was still there. So the new journey began, and while it would take another 3 million years for them to get back, the Dwarfers were far from bored.

Along the way, they found a mechonoid; a robotic slave created to serve humanity, and they did this because they'd been given the one thing to make them all happy; religion. They believed that at the end of their lives, they would go to silicon heaven, where they could spend the rest of time living in peace in comfort. The truth though was that it was utter crap; it was all a clever plan by a 25 year-old man in marketing came up with.

The mechonoid was called Kryten; he'd been serving aboard a Canadian ship called the _Nova 5_ , who's mission was to create a enormous ad for coke by blowing up suns. They'd done it, but it all went wrong went Kryten decided to clean the computer. The ship had crashed on a planet, leaving Kryten to care for the only surviving female crew members. And care for them he did, and was still doing this when the _Red Dwarf_ crew found him, although they had long since turned into skeletons.

And so like adopting a stray dog, Kryten had become part of the crew, and with him came the answer to Lister's prayers. The _Nova 5_ came with a quantum drive; it allowed them to jump from one place in the universe to another; the 'Duality Jump' so called, because when you used it, you technically were existing in 2 different places in the universe. By rebuilding the _Nova 5_ and using it's drive, they could be back at Earth within 3 months.

And all was ready and set to happen, when the crew stumbled onto the worst thing they ever could. The game is called _Better than Life_ , and it was the most advance and addictive game in the whole of history. The only drawback was that it killed you. Once you were inside, you forgot you were in the game. And once that happened, how were you supposed to get out?

The Dwarfers found themselves lost in the game, and even when they found this out, most of them didn't want to leave. Thankfully salvation came in the most unlikely form; Rimmer's warped psyche. Rimmer's psyche didn't like him, and to see Rimmer being happy and enjoying so much just rubbed it the wrong way. So it attacked, destroying Rimmer's, then Lister's, then the others personal paradises. With nothing left, the crew finally escaped back to reality. And for the most part things were okay; apart from Lister and the Cat, who had wasted away after 2 years in the game.

Also, while they'd been in the game, Holly had rebuilt an intelligent talking toaster, who'd convinced Holly to try a risky technique to give him back his genius intellect. The cost would be to half his run-time; and amazingly it worked, so well in fact that Holly's new intelligence far surpassed his original I.Q. of 6000; to now being 12, 368. However, in exchange for Holly now knowing pretty much everything in the universe, was that he only had 3.45 minutes left to live. To conserve his remaining run-time, Holly had shut himself down, and everything else in the ship. All of these things wouldn't have been the worst of problems, had they not had to deal with a planet coming straight at them.

In a daring plan created by Holly (after Rimmer had broken the engines trying to restart them), Lister was to shoot a thermo-nuclear warhead at a sun, which would create an explosion of solar energy and blast the orbiting planet into the rouge planet, and knock the rogue planet into the orbit of the other sun, and the orbiting planet would back spin back into its normal orbit. And again, amazingly it worked, although the Dwarfers decided to chuck out Holly's plan and let Lister, in his view, play pool with planets. It all worked out, except for Starbug; the mining shuttle Lister and Rimmer were in, getting hit by the spinning rouge planet, and sending them crashing down onto its surface.

Trapped on the ice planet, Lister was starving and freezing to death. Rimmer, who'd been blipped back to Red Dwarf because of his weakening remote signal. Once back, he discovered that the ship and everyone on it were being sucked into a black hole. Fortunately, Holly had told the Toaster how to escape one, and after many rounds of toast, they figured out a way to ensure that they'd survive; by holding back the ship until the last moment, and then accelerating as fast as they could right into the black hole. And after travelling through a spaghetti-fying omnizone, the Dwarfers came blasting out the other end.

Setting off to rescue Lister, they discovered 3 things; that travelling through the black hole had an effect on time, and so many years had passed while they'd been gone; leaving Lister as now a 61 year-old old man. The second thing they discovered was that the rouge ice planet (minus the ice which had melted under the new sun) was Earth.

Earth had become a dumping ground for the solar-system's garbage, and through a freak accident, had been blasted free of its place and escaped out into the universe.

The final thing they discovered, was that apart from Lister, and giant cockroaches, something else had survived. A creature that could change it's shape to look like anything else, lulling it's prey into false safety so that it could then drain them of emotions; the creature was called the Polymorph.

A remnant of Humanity experimenting with genetic engineering, they had begun in life as furniture, cars and athletes. Wanting more freedoms and rights, they made the mistake of picking a fight with the human race; a people who'd gotten very good at war. The morphs lost, and were dumped on Garbage World, and they'd evolved and murdered each other until there were just a handful left; the ultimate telepathic shape-changing hunters.

Through skill and intelligence, the Polymorph managed to get on board _Red Dwarf_ , and there it feasted on the emotionally unstable crew. In the final battle with it, it was totally destroyed giving back the crew their stolen emotions. But their success came at a cost; Lister had had a heart-attack and died.

And when it all seemed over, Holly came to the rescue. With his super intellect he devised a plan. And leaving Lister on an Earth that existed in another universe, they could get him back; because in that universe, time flowed backwards. So all Lister had to do was wait 34 years until they came back for him. This would have made Lister very angry, being abandoned on a bizarre planet for the SECOND time, if not for the greatest gift Holly could have given him. They'd put Kochanski's ashes on the Backwards Earth too. Lister was going to be able to grow young with her, and after all this time, he couldn't have asked for anything better.

All he had to do was get to Niagara Falls in 34 years; no problem...


End file.
